GRAND RAPIDS — The dough comes out of a cooler, hits a granite slab, gets a little flour and a lot flatter before the sauce, cheese and toppings round things out. Next step: a hot minute in a shining copper-clad oven. Voila! A wood-fired pizza.

Except this pizza isn’t coming to your doorstep by delivery, or to your table from a restaurant server.

Instead, Grand Rapids buddies Matt Parrott and Dan Woodruff may see you at a festival or wedding reception this summer with their Standard Pizza Co. mobile kitchen, an anything-but-standard take on traditional oven-baked pizza.

The duo are hoping to cash in this summer at banquets, graduation parties and other weekend outings with their custom-made mobile brick oven.

A work of art unto itself, the gleaming oven is one of only 19 like it in the country, they said. It’s handmade in Maine with bricks formed from white clay in the Provence region of France.

Inside, a 900-degree wood fire quickly bakes the pizza, while the outside is cool enough to touch with your hand without getting burned.

“This is our obsession,” said Woodruff, tending the oven this past weekend at the Great Lakes Water Festival in Lowell, where they sold out of their stock by 6 p.m. Saturday — five hours before the event ended for the day.

“We both have other jobs. We both love to cook. We figured that we do it all weekend anyway, why not make some money?”

Woodruff works for Progressive Insurance and Parrott is a youth director at Trinity United Methodist Church in Grand Rapids.

The pair just started hitting the road with their oven in May. The $25,000 joint investment rests on a trailer and can rotate 360-degrees. It’s been quite a draw, he said.
“It really retains the heat well and puts down a great pie,” said Woodruff.

The pizzas are made with their own recipe for “high-hydration dough,” which bakes quickly at temperatures higher than standard for pizza cooking. A minute and a half with some rotation by Woodruff using a long paddle and it’s ready to eat.

The menu is simple: $8 for a “standard” 10-12 inch round with just cheese. Drinks are $1.

Or, for $10, you can have either their “Vampire Weekend:” covered with fresh garlic, banana peppers, whole milk mozzarella and pepperoni, mushrooms or pesto sauce; or, the “Wordless Chorus” with mozzarella, pepperoni and pesto sauce.

They are willing to cater a menu, if asked.

The mobile oven has gotten great response, they said. Hopefully, after recouping investment costs, they would like to own a brick and mortar restaurant.